The top grossing movie of 2023. A film that launched a thousand memes. A satire on gender stereotypes and expectations, an in-your-face howl at the frustration of living in a sexist society, a fever dream of colour and contrast, and a role that set Ryan Gosling up as a living icon. With so much going on you’d be forgiven for overlooking one of the best things about the movie: the set design.
A behind-the-scenes look at Barbie’s Dreamhouse showed us the effort taken in making the world of Barbie as detailed and thoughtful as possible. Items on the set were hand-made and the shades of pink were discussed endlessly in production meetings. We also learn that everyone instinctively walked around the swimming pool despite it being fake. For me, the most interesting part (unsurprisingly) was the fridge.
Blink and you’d miss it in the movie, but as we are introduced into Barbie’s life, she takes a juice carton out of the fridge, fills up a cup with imaginary liquid and tips the empty contents into her mouth (a way of drinking which gets a great callback later). A closer look and you see the fridge is rammed with row upon row of colourful items.
Later in the film, Ken takes over Barbieland and the Dreamhouse is turned into the dystopian Mojo Dojo Casa House. Ken’s fridge, in comparison, is a mini fridge, which we learn is mainly used to store beer. He shows it off proudly when Barbie arrives home. It is surrounded by other ‘male’ items like a punching bag and protein powder.
Whether Greta Gerwig meant to or not, these two fridges perfectly depict historical gender norms that the film seeks to unpack.
When fridges first appeared in the USA in the early 20th century, they were advertised as a woman’s appliance, and housewives were the target audience for sales (bought by their husbands, of course). It was so tacitly understood that fridges were a marker of the housewife’s domesticity that some adverts depicted a woman in full wedding dress and veil being presented with a fridge, signalling the home-making role they would play for the rest of their married lives. Some celebrated that after WWII where women took up jobs traditionally reserved for men, in the 1950s the kitchen was a way of shackling women back into stable gender norms.
But simply having a fridge was not enough. Fridges became a sign of proper care that women were expected to devote to their families. Adverts featured fridges full to the brim with traditional, wholesome and fresh foods. Joints of meat, bottles of milk, platters of chilled desserts, fresh fruit and vegetables and full bottles and jars were set behind a scene of familial bliss. Children often accompanied the wife in the adverts, joyfully bounding about, curiously peering inside or accepting a glass of juice.
Fridges became an icon of prosperity, the nuclear family and the American dream, and the housewife was to uphold these ideals through caring for the household. You couldn’t bear to imagine a good housewife presiding over an empty fridge, which is what some adverts made explicit. (Arguably, this all suggests that food waste was baked into fridge design and the way it was expected to be used, something I am currently researching.) Selling fridges in the mid-20th century also became about selling the ideal American woman.
The first Barbie launched in 1959 and Mattel’s Barbie fridge reflects these themes in the movie’s Dreamhouse; the fridge is full, colourful and the variety of items on display are neatly arranged. The main difference from historical fridges adverts is the food itself; instead of joints of meat, platters, and whole fruits and vegetables, there are rows of soda cans, cookie dough, yogurts, milkshakes and peanut butter. Fruits line the door in Tupperware, already perfectly chopped into bitesize chunks. This is the fridge that a child would dream of.
Nevertheless, the gendered expectation shines through. The fridge is fully stocked, not a gap in sight. A cake sits on the bottom shelf, ready to be served to guests. Of course Barbie would know what food to buy, how to store it properly and have enough to feed everyone – she is an ideal American woman, albeit living in a child’s world.
In contrast, Ken’s mini fridge is small and bland. It only holds beer, a stereotypical ‘male’ drink. But Ken’s fridge wouldn’t need to be big enough to store fresh produce – food work is a woman’s arena, and surely he’d just be fed by a Barbie, or order pizza. Why bother keeping his own well-stocked fridge? All he needs is a mini fridge for the things he likes. The message is clear: women’s fridges are about domestic labour; men’s fridges are about leisure.
There is a satisfying moment in the third act when Barbie and Ken realise that one gender ruling the other doesn’t work and that the patriarchy makes men suffer too; Ken admits that he hated his mini fridge. It was just so small! The freezer didn’t even work properly!
Some questions still go unanswered. What would an ideal fridge look like in a universe where we have gender equality? If we keep Barbie’s original fridge, someone will always have to do the work to plan, buy, and store the food. Would that work be split equally? Or would everyone have one smaller fridge each? Alternatively, would there be a different system altogether? Would everyone just eat out every day? Would community canteens be the norm? Or would all meals be delivered?
The ideals around fridges tell us a lot about the ideals we hold for how food should be consumed. Fridges are so embedded in our lives that it’s impossible to imagine living without one. And they are historically contingent, born of an era where the patriarchy influenced the structure of the home and the division of labour. Whatever you thought of Barbie and how it grappled with gender inequality, please know that the fridges were portrayed perfectly.
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FOOD WASTE STORIES 